Patrick White

Brutal, Cold, Normal Life Poem by Patrick White

Brutal, cold, normal life with a few familial affections to warm your heart at as if you held your hands toward a fire. The heart goes blue, the heart goes red, two-thirds of a triune traffic light. I’m not shedding, the way the autumn trees are, there’s still hair on my head though its the urn of somebody’s ashes I never met. I try to treat it with respect and there’s a smile on my face the colourif my eyes I use for default when there’s a glitch of good luck that makes a grey day blue.

I’ve forgiven my lovers and friends their careless infidelities. The matchthrown from the car that started a forest fire of sensitivities that didn’t like to be criticized. I only know one who keeps his word like an exotic bird in his rib cage he’s teaching how to escape. If I ask it’s precious, little enoughcompared to what I’ve given, though most of my gifts remain unopened, I’ve dropped my pine-cones like time capsules on a seabed of compass needles to soften the blow when I root in the conflagration to come, take hold, and show you what it is to be Slavic and stand up to the wind.I don’t ask for much so I’m never disappointed.

There are verities. And then there are perennial truths. Sooner or later you get sick of them, their relentlessness, almost tyrannyand after that there’s nothing but oblivionto look forward to exploring, as if it never mattered which boot you put on first, or if your toothpaste tasted like a blessing or a curse. And you don’t know if you’re eloquent Aaron or recalcitrant Moses when he faced his snakey rod off against pharaoh’s magicians. Big snake eat the little snake and the little snakes go down easy, like wet noodles, the wrong way.It’s hard to know whether to resign yourself to life, or celebrate like the clown who believed there was something sacredabout his calling, making the mourners laughat their own funerals. Haven’t been that way since Grade six when an award taught me the Book of Changes begins with a logjam of yarrow sticks, a sloppy job of clear-cutting everything that goes on in an old growth forest.

I got as far as the Book of Total Knowledge, volume L, and gave up cramming my drawers with the old wind socks of flights I’ve never taken because of the rain and poor visibility.Pick a loose thread from the shoulder of an oil spill and you’ve got a total eclipse of everything you’ve ever tried to understand blacked out like London in the blitz. Lightning wars that freed the slaves like rainwhen one or the other got its feelings hurtby witching for water in hell. By now the grail is a skull full of stardust that won’t slake anybody’s thirst in this mirage of a desert.

I don’t blame anyone anymore for the things they did or didn’t do. History’s an old menu for blood and the peasants are always caught off guard like the Newfoundland cod bankswhen the Catholic church passed an infallible papal edict that said everyone had to eat fish on Fridays. Ichthus. Good Greek word. The sun is in the vernal equinox. A hunter’s moon in Virgo. Why not? Is quantum physics any less superstitious? Everybody’s good guess must be toleratedthough the wilderness is more of a natural antidote than a pharmaceutical fish farm. But wouldn’t it be a bummer if they learned how to make everything live forever thirty years from now?

Bad timing, as if we had anything to do with it. I’ve grown nostalgic for the waterclocks my youth knew before I started wandering by myselfby the Tay River late at night when I might be somebody dangerous, when, in fact, I’m just alonewith my own thoughts and memories as if it weren’t anybody’s business but my own, though it’s not wise to freeze up in the highbeams of an inquisitive squad car that thought it saw a raccoon with a balaclava instead of a maskon its head. The terrorists have infiltrated our genetically modified, corn-fed gardens. Darkness and anonymity are my close friendsthough I’m sure they know who I am.Solitude is my longest standing, undemanding mistress.I can’t understand most of the follies of peopleanymore than I can any longer distinguishthe gaudier feathers of the strutting peacockscompared to the dowdiness of the hens when it all comes down to whether you want to enjoy sex with me tonight or not. I’m not shocked by anything except a virgin at forty-one.Or a nun who knows the Pierian spring is between her legs.

I walk like the old bull who’s been led to the altar many times before strong enoughfor the slaughter and the sacrifice, but bored with the details of why it must be so. Didn’t I look far enough into your eyesto make course corrections on my starmapsbefore you started shining like a moonrise? Don’t tell me it wasn’t love at first sight when you looked at me like a slumlord and you saw the rent like a matador in a tauromachia of the sun and the moon on the hoofs and horns you draped in garlands of gored roses?

The scorpion jumped on the back of the frogand the lesson was on him. Too bad a dragon stopped to give you a ride you couldn’t poison.Misplaced compassion isn’t always a mandatefor extermination. Or a good deed the onset of a rebuke by the devil that feels like punishment, or the truce of love, surrender to a creature that can’t help being what it was meant to be, but it’s circumspect to note the stinger at the endof the question, when the sphinx looks forward to the interrogation as if the future of the answerlay ahead like the one voice for the three ages of man.